The Communications Minister Denis Naughten is meeting with Facebook bosses in New York today after it emerged that staff were instructed to leave violent content online.

Communications Minister Denis Naughten.

The revelations were made in a Channel 4 programme which also showed staff in the company's Dublin office using a racist meme as an example of acceptable content to leave up.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar says it highlights the problems in trying to regulate the internet.

He said: "These companies including Facebook have community standards, we expect them to uphold their own standards. The evidence produced from this batch is that they haven't, at least not on all occasions. That would represent, in my view, a failure of self-regulation.

We do need to bear in mind this is the internet, this is the world wide web. Regulation in one country may not work either and that is probably why we need global solutions to what is a global industry.

Tech Expert Jess Kelly also says the programme raised major questions about the regulation of social media companies.

She said: "They self-regulate, anything that their moderators take down or authorise to stay up is within the confines of their own community standards.